Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306140340
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He was a big-league baseball player.
He pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies.
Kids don't believe Holland was in the majors until he hauls in his old publicity photos.
Kids are enamored of Holland, but he won't play the glamour guy. He tells them he's just a man trying to get along in the world.
"Let me tell you something," he says. "Nobody gave me nothing. Everything I got, I earned it."
"You've got to be a father, a big brother and a friend to all of these kids," Holland says. "These kids love that one-on-one."
Sometimes they don't. Holland is the chief disciplinarian at the center. He's big, strong. He bellows. He scares the heck out of a bad-acting kid. Then he'll hug him.
George Franklin, the center director, says Holland's kind of discipline is needed by kids whose worst punishment at their home schools was "in-school suspensions." Franklin says: "You got to come face to face with somebody who says, `That don't go, baby.' "
From 8 a.m. to midafternoon, Holland runs the center's "boot camp," where he works on the self-respect and discipline of middle-schoolers and a few high school guys.
He coaches baseball and football in the afternoons at William Fleming High School.
His morning kids at Alternative Ed are sleepy-eyed. Some haven't had breakfast.
"Cable TV is the worst thing that happened to these kids," he says. "If they're not dealing drugs, some watch movies all night." As he says this, a young man naps on a stack of gym mats, his hood up over his head.
Holland has a strong notion of what he's trying to do:
Get the kids to trust somebody and to communicate.
"They've been hurt. They've been abused. They don't know who to trust. So many people have lied to them. It's easy for these kids to say, `Don't nobody care about me.' "
Some, he says, cuss out their own mothers.
A few months ago, kids in boot camp were reading about dropout counselor John Canty, a man they know from his work at the center. He'd been charged with having sex at his home with a 13-year-old girl he counseled. Canty, who denied the charges, was suspended from the school system.
Whatever the truth is, Holland said, the accusations won't help the kids' fragile faith in adults.
Help them see their possibilities in life. Give them hope and confidence.
Some kids know more than they ever showed at their home schools. Others, Holland says, don't read well and hate reading aloud. They're afraid of being laughed at.
They don't push themselves, he says, "because somebody's put a tag on them."
Show them how to get along with others.
"This year I made it a personal thing that we would not have any fights," Holland said.
He brought in boxing gloves. When two kids are about to punch each other out, he suits them up and holds a match - just him and the guys in the room. It usually lasts 15 to 30 seconds. Then the tension dissolves.
"These kids are learning to get along. They think they have to prove that they're men and women, when they're boys and girls."
They stand in formation as he surveys them from the boot camp stage. "Let me commend you on your behavior this morning," he says. "You have to learn how to live with each other. We'll have a better school, a better city, a better state, a better country, a better world."
Getting them to cooperate long enough to set up chairs for a visiting choir one day last winter was an accomplishment. Holland said it wouldn't have been possible even a few weeks earlier, they were so uneasy with each other.
Get them to see and resist the negative forces around them.
With drugs, AIDS and alcohol, Holland said, "They have more things knocking on their door than we ever had."
Hold them accountable for what they do.
Kids constantly ask Holland for pencils to write the essays he assigns from newspaper articles. They can't seem to remember to bring pencils from home, so he charges them a quarter. He keeps a pencil fund.
Help them understand that people judge them by how they look/act/talk.
One day, Holland corrects a kid, who says defensively, "I ain't do nuttin'."
Later, the quote appears in big cut-out letters. "I put that on the wall," Holland says, "so they could see what they're saying." And think about it.
This spring, Holland got frustrated with guys wearing their fashionable pants low, all the way to their crotches.
He found a spool of brown yarn on the street. He keeps it on his office window sill. He pulls off long pieces, three or four strands thick, and makes kids tie up their trousers. Some kids wound up asking for the "rope," as they call it. They'd bought pants so big, they were falling down.
Holland says if he could stand in the center of Roanoke and address the city about the kids he counsels at Alternative Ed, he'd say:
"They're the future. Go to your slum areas, look on your street corners, during the day, during the night, check the backgrounds of some of your homeless - some of them probably started out like some of these students."
Young people die in Roanoke - five teen-agers have been slain on city streets since 1990.
They might have done some good, Holland says. "Their contributions? We'll never know what they would have been."
by CNB